Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Cooking for real people: Tonight's sauce is tomorrow's soup

At least potentially.

I made pork with salsa verde. (I am not going to give you a recipe for salsa verde, which you can easily find on the web, but mine included tomatillos, roasted garlic, jalapenos, poblanos, cilantro, cumin, and chicken stock.)

Now, I was slow cooking the pork in the sauce, and so I wanted enough to cover the pork loin. We ate the pork in tortillas, meaning no way we were going to use all that sauce, or we would've been drowning our tortillas. What to do with the extra sauce?

Make a soup out of it! The next night I added more chicken stock to the remaining sauce, and then put in hominy, beans, mixed vegetables, and I shredded the remaining pork and threw that in as well. But the list of what you might add to make your soup is only limited by your imagination, and the dictates of good taste.

The principle is general: have extra sauce? Consider whether it would make a good base for a soup.